The prosecutor's behavior was outrageous. He and the accuser should be prosecuted. The people in the press and at Duke who jumped on the bandwagon against the boys were in the wrong.
But spare me your faux-outrage, conservatives.
Radley Balco (a libertarian blogger and FOXNews.com contributor) has a great response to this idiotic statement by Glenn Reynolds:
In the conventional imagination, it used to be -- see To Kill a Mockingbird or reports of the Scottsboro rape trial -- that it was the noble fairness-obsessed lefties who supported due process against the ignorant right-wing hicks who tried to lynch people out of a mixture of racism, political opportunism borne of racism, journalistic sensationalism, and sheer meanness. Now the hats have switched. That's worth noting.
Balco's response:
I'm not left-wing or right-wing (though I've been accused of both).
But the reason why the narrative for most of the last century has been that of noble, left-wing ACLU and NAACP lawyers coming to the aid of black people wrongly accused by racist white people is because for most of the last century, that's the way it has actually happened. Over and over and over. And I'm not just talking about the Jim Crow era. See Tulia. Or Hearne. Or the dozens of people freed by the liberal lawyers at the Innocence Project.
And let's not go overboard in heaping praise on the Duke players' more conservative defenders. Reynolds is an honest-to-goodness civil libertarian. So I don't include him in this. But to hear law-and-order right-wingers like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, or the Powerline crew scream about prosecutoral excess, the rights of the accused, and political opportunism on the part of a prosecutor these past few months really strained all credulity. Yes. I'd love to think their interest in this case was motivated solely by their sense of justice. But come on. Does anyone not think the race and class of the accused, the race and class of the accuser, and the politics of feminism and anti-feminism had something to do with their sudden embrace of and familiarity with NACDL talking points?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these conservatives have gotten religion. Maybe in the future, O'Reilly, Hannity, & Co. will actually make a cause celebre about cases where the accused aren't rich white kids with high-paid attorneys accused of raping a poor black woman. I'm skeptical.
